The armed man who rammed his truck into a Reform synagogue in Michigan on Thursday has been identified as 41-year-old Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a naturalized citizen born in Lebanon, US federal officials said Friday.

Multiple reports, as well as a statement from the mayor of Dearborn Heights, who said he was a resident, said that several of Ghazali’s Lebanese relatives were killed in an Israeli airstrike recently, amid the renewed fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah terror group.

Security guards opened fire on Ghazali after he smashed a truck through the doors of the Temple Israel synagogue and preschool in West Bloomfield, near Detroit.

According to the US Department of Homeland Security, Ghazali came to the United States in 2011 on an IR1 immigrant visa, given to spouses of US citizens, and was granted US citizenship himself in 2016, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Ghazali worked at a popular restaurant in Dearborn Heights, Hamido, but had been absent in recent weeks, fellow employees told The New York Times. Coworkers and a neighbor praised him to the Detroit Free Press, with the neighbor saying she had planned to bring him flowers because his brother had died.

He was divorced and had at least one child, according to The Detroit News, which cited court records. The newspaper reported, citing two people familiar with the investigation, that at least four of Ghazali’s relatives, including a sibling, “had been killed days earlier in a military strike in Lebanon.”

Dearborn Heights Mayor Mo Baydoun said in a statement that this month, “he lost several members of his own family, including his niece and nephew, in an Israeli attack on their home in Lebanon.”

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© The Times of Israel